It is widely acknowledged that the most important cause of reduction in yield in high volume production of large area AMFPDs is the high number of damaged active devices. The main causes for having damaged devices are the high defect density and also the grain boundaries that exist in the material which the substrates are made of. These causes place unavoidable limits on device dimension down-scaling, and therefore on circuit redundancy, as well as pixel size and density.
AMFPD devices are currently fabricated on amorphous silicon substrates. The use of amorphous silicon results from the fact that it is not possible to produce crystalline substrates by simply depositing silicon on an amorphous starting material such as glass. Although it is possible to obtain polycrystalline substrates, their fabrication requires more expensive starting materials to be used and/or more processing steps to be applied.
The standard LCD fabrication has been disclosed by W. C. O'Mara in "Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Displays Part I: Manufacturing Process", Solid State Technology December 1991, pp. 64-69, and statistics for the causes of failure of assembled panels are reported therein.
In the article "Present and Future Trend of Electron Device Technology in Flat Panel Display" by T. Uchida, IEEE IEDM Technical Digest 1991, pp. 1.2.1-1.2.6, there is disclosed a formula for the yield of LCD panels as a function of the defect density, circuit redundancy, pixel density, and total area of the panel.
The possibility of having a high quality crystalline semiconductor substrate, like the silicon wafers employed in VLSI technology, would drastically reduce the surface defect density, with a consequent reduction in the number of damaged devices and thereby a major improvement in the manufacturing yield.